The Chicago Tribune on Enron and Campaign Finance Reform:
They gave to some 71 senators and 188 House members. They gave some $600,000 to George W. Bush. And the Bush administration has plenty of top officials with Enron ties–including Army Secretary Thomas White, a former company executive; chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, a former consultant; and political adviser Karl Rove, who owned a lot of Enron stock.
By now, though, former chairman Kenneth Lay must be wondering why he bothered.
The company stood to make a lot of money from the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide emissions, but the president rejected it. Enron lobbied Congress to change the tax laws so its foreign subsidiaries could conceal their debts, and Congress refused. Lindsey, asked to do an analysis of the damage that an Enron bankruptcy would do to the economy, concluded it was nothing to worry about.
And when the meltdown finally began, all the people who had gotten help from Enron turned a deaf ear to its pleas for help. Lay phoned Commerce Secretary Donald Evans to ask for help in preventing a downgrade of Enron’s bond rating. Evans recalls, “I listened to him and told him thank you very much.”